Freelance Transformation

Freelance Transformation is a podcast all about building a freelance business that creates the lifestyle that you desire, not the other way around. If you are looking to find great clients, do your best work, earn higher rates, and enjoy getting out of bed in the morning, this podcast is for you, the freelancer, the consultant, the agency owner, the creative. Matt Inglot, your host, delivers a new episode every Monday to up your freelancing game.
Past guests include Alan Weiss, Michael Port, Brennan Dunn, and other top experts.
Show website: http://freelancetransformation.com

This episode is all about the most powerful ways you can go from employee to freelancer. Even if you don’t have any clients lined up. You can still make the freelance transformation with confidence as long as you’re willing to put in the effort.

Our guest today actually used my Freelance Start course in order to transform himself into a full-time freelancer. Josiah Mory helps store owners on Shopify improve their customer experience with customer research. But he wasn’t always a consultant. Josiah put in the work, made a few mistakes along the way, and now he’s sharing with us today every twist and turn he took on his path to becoming a freelancer!

The agency space may have a reputation for cultivating a negative atmosphere, but building an agency doesn’t have to be all bad. You just have to build your agency with intention, and that’s exactly what our guest on this episode is doing.

Mike Arnesen is a freelance analyst and SEO fanatic who just so happened to build his own agency called UpBuild. After a few bad experiences, he decided to take what he learned and apply it to a better business model. Now, he puts the mental well-being of himself and his staff before anything else. Mike shares how he learned from his mistakes and overcame the all-too-common tragic sins of professional agencies.

It’s time to stop overcomplicating lead generation. Your marketing strategy does not have to give you a migraine. There are ways to keep marketing simple, and we've got marketing guru Kyla Roma on the podcast today to show you how to do just that.

Kyla is a marketing and profit consultant who uses her minimalist marketing strategies to build an audience and attract clients. It’s all about playing to your strengths and finding a marketing strategy that works best for you and your ideal audience. We talk today about how you can harness your strengths and apply your unique skill set to a winning marketing campaign.

We always talk about getting clients on this show, but the real work doesn’t actually start until you’ve signed them on. What do you do when you finally start that client project? How do you manage your time with all these deadlines? It’s no easy task managing all of the moving pieces.

Whether you work alone or with a team, project management is crucial to your success as a freelancer. If you want to work with clients effectively, then it’s best to recognize project management as a collaborative process.

Edmund Zaloga, founder of Responsify, knows about what can go wrong – and what can go right – when it comes to project management. Edmund shares with us on this episode how he learned to manage his projects and the technology that can make it all a little easier!

Before becoming a freelancer, RJ McCollam was fired from his job, evicted from his apartment, and even had his car repossessed. It took losing everything to inspire his motivation. Now, ten years later, he’s a successful web developer who’s guest spotting podcasts to share his experience with the rest of us.

RJ is talking today about building a freelance career from the bottom up. He taught himself how to build websites and used his skills to find a full-time job. That full-time career eventually led to his freelance transformation, and he’s sharing all the steps (and mistakes) he made along the way.

Imagine sitting in front of a corporate board and pitching your skills for a project. Do you even know where to start? Luckily we have Nathan Allotey on this episode to speak to attracting and winning corporate clients. Nathan never calls himself just a freelancer. He is a web designer and digital marketing strategist. And his portfolio consists of corporate clients. He uses his presence online to help other freelancers win corporate clients through learning from his mistakes.

Nathan is here today to give us a little insight into what criteria corporate clients are looking for. His inside information and experience are invaluable. If you’re thinking about bringing your freelance career into the corporate world, tune in now!

Our guest today will be the first to tell you that you don’t need to use a super expensive sales funnel to attract clients to your business. Consistent action will win clients every time. Kirk Williams, owner of Zato Marketing, is a paid search marketer who started his career on Twitter. But his online presence on Twitter and through online forums helped him generate leads and a client pool he actually likes to work with.

On this episode, Kirk is breaking down his client acquisition strategy. His approach might surprise you. He wasn’t always at the top of his game. He shares what it was like to learn how to run a business from scratch, and the mistakes he made will change the way you look at running a business. At best, it might even inspire you to change the way you approach social media marketing.

Breaking out of the corporate world could be one of the best career decisions you ever make. Once you make that freelance transformation, you can start making your own schedule and picking your own clients. But what happens when you need to write a contract? Or when tax season rolls around?

Abbey Woodcock is a copywriter and freelancer coach who has learned first-hand from her own business mistakes. In the beginning, Abbey focused more on her craft than her business, and it ended up costing her thousands of dollars. Abbey shares why project management, legal protection, and financial planning should be some of the most important aspects of running your own freelance business. So if you’re having a hard time navigating the professional morass of running your own freelance business, then this episode is for you!

Start imagining your ideal client. Get as specific as you can. Pick out the things you love most about your freelance career…

Today’s guest was able to narrow down her niche by focusing on the thing she loves most – humor. Lianna Patch is a conversion copywriter and conference speaker who uses her amazing sense of humor to create interactive content for her clients. She’s injecting personality into her business and working with clients she genuinely likes. Her advice today will loosen you up and help you build the client list you actually want to work with.

If you make the right moves, you can build an agency in just three years. Think it’s impossible? Think again! We have Emily Hirsh on the show today just to prove that it is entirely possible to build your brand and your business in only three years.

Three years ago, Emily started as a virtual assistant. At first, she managed social media for her clients. Running successful Facebook campaigns turned into Emily’s niche, and she decided to break out on her own. She now runs her own digital marketing agency with 18 employees, and it’s steadily growing.

Working for yourself isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible. Our guest today left her career of over twenty years to start her own business. It was always something Merideth Bisiker wanted to do, and being there for her family finally inspired her to do it.

Less than a year ago, Merideth left her full-time job to become Merideth the Money Coach. She helps clients with money management techniques and helps them recover from financial crisis. She’s on Freelance Transformation today to talk about the work-life balance that is sometimes hard to manage when working for yourself. And she shares how you can pull off the transition from full-time to self-employment and how she balances her career in order to be there for her family.

Job sites like Upwork aren’t just oversaturated watering holes for freelancers. There are ways to find real, high-paying clients on these sites. Don’t believe me? Well, our guest today is here to prove this point exactly.

Tom Casano is an SEO consultant and founder of the Sure Oak consulting firm. He ramped up his business over the past 16 months by optimizing his availability on Upwork.com. On this episode, Tom discusses what cues you can look for when filtering through clients, and his proposal strategy might just change the way you look at job board sites. They are an amazing client source if you can tap into them. Tom’s refreshing perspective could inspire you to take a chance and create a profile today!

In order to be a successful freelancer, you have to create that human experience. Connecting with clients online can make that kind of experience really difficult, but it’s not impossible. Our guest today specializes in building connections with clients by creating online communities.

Sophie Bujold is the creator of Cliqueworthy, an agency that connects clients with their ideal online communities. Sometimes her clients are starting from scratch, but most of the time these clients already have a community; they just don’t know what to do with it. You can use your online community to carry your message and build your brand. Sophie shares some tips on this episode to help us find clients and build relationships online that are both sincere and successful!

If you think you can’t use content marketing to connect with your ideal clients - think again!

Content marketing is effective no matter what niche or skill you’re selling. If you’re having trouble making it work for you, then you might be doing it wrong. According to my guest today, a lot of us are doing content marketing wrong.

Devesh Khanal is a content marketing guru who used to be just like us. He never thought content marketing would work for him until a fateful meeting with his future business partner, Benji Hyam. Together, the two of them started their own content marketing agency, and they help big businesses and freelancers alike manage their content marketing campaigns.

There is more than one way to find clients. Set your pitches aside for a moment and tune in to today’s episode. James Johnson is on the show today to talk about the ways you can think outside of the box and snag the kind of clients you really want to work with.

James Johnson is a freelance writer and founder of the Freelance Writers School. His grassroots approach to finding clients is a complete game changer. James teaches his unconventional methods to other freelancers in order to help them build relationships and find their ideal clients, and he’s sharing his techniques on The Freelance Transformation right now!

Sometimes we underestimate how hard it really is to scale a business. Many of us fail to take a closer look at our business model before we get started and then we are overwhelmed when everything starts to take off all at once.

So, is it possible to scale your business with your sanity intact?

Breanne Dyck, Founder of MNIB Consulting Inc., is here on Episode 164 to reveal a few tips which could help you to scale your business without losing any (or all) of your sanity. Breanne generously shares what this framework looks like and how she helps freelancers and businesses to "scale up without burning out." She shows us how these methods are both sustainable and realistic.

On this episode of the Freelance Transformation Podcast, we get to talk about what it’s like to sell to and work with corporate clients. And when we say corporate clients, that typically means companies that are bigger than what we’d normally consider a small business. They have proper departments, multiple shareholders, and tens, hundreds or thousands of employees. Companies where you’re dealing with multiple stakeholders involved in decisions. And of course, usually bigger budgets.

To speak to this topic is Henrik Becker. Henrik is a marketing automation consultant that very quickly realized that corporate clients are a much better fit for his services than smaller businesses, so he has focused on serving them. On this episode, we will discuss how he found his corporate clients, the reasons why he focuses on this group and some of the strategies around how to successfully work on contracts in the corporate environment.

Being a freelancer can be harder than you think it is. We still dread going to work sometimes, even when we work from home. And there’s still that looming threat of “is this all there is?” If you’re looking for something more in your business, then today’s episode is for you. On this episode, Kevin Monroe talks about how we can all find a purpose for our freelance business.

Kevin Monroe is a leadership consultant and executive coach who helps high achievers find and connect with their purpose in life. Finding a purpose goes beyond just making money for yourself, and it goes well beyond success too. It’s time to stop going through the motions and start working with some intention.

Brian Downard wasn’t always serving one kind of client. He started in app development, but he found his calling in lead generation for home and garden businesses.

Serving one vertical like this is even more specific than finding a niche. Brian talks about what inspired him to focus on this particular vertical and the mistakes and the successes that he's made that ultimately shaped his business and his brand.

Michael Zipursky of Consulting Success has spent nearly two decades building consulting agencies. Over the last ten years, he’s dedicated his time to helping other consultants & freelancers alike to build better businesses. His experience has taught him that having the right mindset is what sets truly successful freelancers apart.

Michael believes that most freelancers are held back because their mind isn’t in the right place. We all know the steps toward success, we can even have the tools to achieve them, but if you’re in the wrong mindset, you’re never going to unlock your true potential. Your mindset will get you in front of the high-quality clients you’re looking for, and help you achieve that freedom and flexibility you want from your career.

Upgrading from freelancer to solo-preneur is the trajectory some of us take in our businesses, but taking that first step isn’t always easy. How do you know when you’re ready?

Duane Brown, Founder of Take Some Risk - a digital marketing agency, discusses his transition from freelancing to starting his own agency. Duane shares some of the risks he took to make that first leap and why and how he's decided to build an agency.

When it comes to freelancing, we all have to start somewhere. And the reality is that those beginnings are pretty humble. Your first client probably won’t be a giant account and you probably won’t be making hundreds of dollars per hour. In fact, the whole project might be $100.

But how do you get from that point to better clients, higher paying, possibly building a team, and most importantly having a business that enables whatever lifestyle you’re looking for?

Joe Kashurba went through this exact journey, and his started all the way back in high school and led to him ultimately winning $30,000 website projects and managing 6 figure advertising accounts.

Joe will be sharing his journey in-depth, including the key realizations he made around his ideal clients, how he priced himself, what packaging his services did for him, and how he ultimately built a team.

Crystal Smith is the mastermind behind Shine Consulting where she helps solo-preneurs tell their origin stories in order to sell themselves better. Crystal refers to this process as "story-selling." Story-selling is more than just talking about your experiences, it's about connecting your own personal story to your business.

Crystal shares her own origin story and offers some great advice on how to use this emotional marketing technique to build your personal brand!

Being a freelancer is often synonymous with being a "jack of all trades." You do everything in your business. You could be a web designer or writer, but you’re also a manager, a bookkeeper, and a marketer. Matt Kohn of Different Hunger Media shares his story of building his solo-freelance business into an agency. And how it's allowed him to focus on the development and future planning of his business.